The 34th São Paulo International Film Festival is upon us (October 22 to November 4)! And I had the pleasure of watching a silent film out of 1927 Germany called Metropolis, all from the grassy fields of Ibirapuera Park, which is essentially like New York’s Central Park. (It even has loads of art museums, pavilions, gardens, auditoriums and a planetarium.) Fritz Lang’s film was thought to be lost, with only one original negative and various prints of the abridged version of it known to still exist, until recently (2008), when a negative of the full-length 16mm version (a half hour longer than the abridged version) was found in Buenos Aires.

So the 83-year-old film was projected on the back of the right-angle-triangle-shaped Auditório Ibirapuera, with Gottfried Huppertz’s original score being played by the Orquestra Jazz Sinfônica and maestro João Mauricio Galindo in a space carved out of the building’s same wall. The film’s first screening in Latin America was definitely something to see, and the area surrounding the auditorium was packed, without a single space left to sit on the grass or in the chairs provided, so plenty of people saw it. Danke, Deutschland!